


209. gazing out into space

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [264]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-08 18:59:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10393962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: Helena is in the woods. Sarah is in the woods. These are not the same woods, but in a way they are.





	

**Author's Note:**

> [warning: animal death]
> 
> Vague spoilers for Season 5!

Helena keeps seeing Sarah out of the corner of her eye. She knows it’s not real; her eyes don’t know that at all. Sarah stumbling between the trees. Sarah crouched in the roots. Sarah the trees, and the roots, and the spaces in-between them. When she looks at Helena her eyes go right through.

Helena drops her snare to the ground, gets her phone out of her pocket and dials Sarah’s number. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. _The party you are trying to reach—_

Sarah is sitting on the ground in front of her. She has a pocketknife. She’s sharpening a stick with it, only her hands are clumsy and shaking and she keeps cutting herself. “Hold still,” Helena tells her. “Point stick at ground. Not at you.” But Sarah doesn’t listen. She keeps carving, desperate, blood crusted in her eyelashes and winking red at Helena every time she blinks.

* * *

Sarah keeps seeing Helena out of the corner of her eye. She knows it’s not real; Helena is clearer than everything else in this terrible forest, all of it gummed up with Sarah’s blood. Helena is glowing. Helena is just like Beth, in that there’s no way that she’s real. She’s lurching her steady way between the trees, she’s pulling rabbits out of the roots. How she can see them in the dark Sarah does not know.

“Help me,” she says. “Come _on_ , Helena, please? Talk to me?” But Helena doesn’t listen. She breaks a rabbit’s neck like it’s easy. She keeps frowning vaguely in Sarah’s direction, like Sarah is a sound she can almost hear but doesn’t like the tone of. Like Sarah’s a disappointment, and Sarah understands that feeling too well.

“I tried,” she says. “I swear I tried.”

Helena picks up a rabbit. She walks away deeper into the woods, and Sarah can see her clearly the whole time.

* * *

Sarah doesn’t go away.

* * *

Helena comes back.

* * *

“Where is Sarah,” Helena says, when she gets back to the hut. She knows where Sarah is: Sarah is trying to build a fire outside, even though the sun’s up. Helena drops her bag inside the hut and goes back out – so she can start cleaning the meat, but also so she can keep an eye on Sarah.

“She had to go look for Cosima,” Donnie says, following her out and making that face he makes whenever he remembers how cold it is in the woods.

“Where is Cosima?” Helena says.

“I don’t know,” Donnie says. “Some island. Nobody really tells us much.”

“Yes,” Helena murmurs, “not enough to fill a belly.” The fire won’t catch. Sarah is shaking, shaking. “Are there woods on this island.”

“I don’t know,” Donnie says. “Maybe?”

“Hm,” Helena says. The fire lights.

* * *

The fire lights. Sarah holds her hands as close as she can to the fire, and they don’t get warm. Helena looms over the tiny light of it, watching her, face inscrutable. “Fat lot of help you were,” Sarah tells her.

Helena drops the small wet body she’s holding to the ground and then follows it, holds her hands out in front of Sarah’s fire. She turns around to say something to a tree, and then she looks at Sarah.

Sarah looks back at her.

Helena reaches out a hand, but it goes through. She sighs. She moves her mouth in a series of words Sarah can’t hold onto, then tilts her head to the side: _yes?_

Sarah shakes her head. _No_. “You shouldn’t be mute,” she says. “Beth wasn’t. Can’t even – keep the bloody rules straight, can I?” She’s shaking, but she doesn’t feel cold anymore. Probably not good. “Can I, Helena?” she says, and there’s too much fear in that for it to be the question she’d meant it to be.

Helena reaches out and cups Sarah’s face again, her hand lingering just a bare millimeter away from Sarah’s skin. Sarah pretends that she can feel it, that there’s a hand there – a palm connected to a hand connected to the arm of a person who could help her. She can’t let herself cry, it’s too cold for that, but she’s doing it anyways.

She closes her eyes. “I’m so scared,” she tells the dark. But: with her eyes closed it’s like Helena isn’t there, and she’s terrified, and she opens her eyes again. Helena is still there, and she looks just as scared as Sarah does.

 _Sarah_ , she says.

 _Helena_ , Sarah says, and lifts up her hand to reach back.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


End file.
